Lead Software Engineer

Job Title: Lead Software Engineer – Core Technology

Location: US Remote or Hybrid (Los Gatos, CA) – Pacific Time Zone preferred

Employment Type: Full-time Employee

Salary Range: $195K-$245k depending on experience and location

About the Role

We are seeking a seasoned Lead Software Engineer to join our Core Technology team, developing the automatic content recognition (ACR) library code, pipelines, and tools that power Audible Magic’s products across some of the largest and most high-traffic sites on the internet. As part of a small, high-performing team of experienced engineers and audio technology researchers, you will maintain and extend a mature and successful codebase while helping drive the design, development, and delivery of next generation ACR capabilities and platform services.

Key Responsibilities

● Architect & Build robust, performant, scalable, and observable services, customer client applications, and library code using primarily Rust (with occasional Go and Python contributions, and some support of legacy applications written in C), while ensuring clean, maintainable code.

● Extend and maintain the corecode that forms the foundation of Audible Magic’s content recognition technology.

● Profile and optimize library and service hot paths for low-latency, high-throughput operation at internet scale, including memory layout, concurrency correctness, GPU acceleration, and SIMD where it counts.

● Develop new ACR products and services around audio and music content identification.

● Create ACR solutions for high-profile customers, including leading social media platforms.

● Write and maintain automation scripts in Python and other technologies for CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and operational tasks.

● Leverage Docker (including Compose) and mocks for reproducible builds, containerized deployments, as well as repeatable and one-off testing.

● Embrace troubleshooting and development challenges with composure and positivity. Must be able to thrive in a dynamic environment with changing priorities.

● Lead code reviews, enforce coding standards, and drive quality through static analysis, dependency vulnerability scanning, and rigorous testing practices for library-grade code, such as unit, integration, and performance tests, property-based testing and fuzzing for parser/codec paths.

● Partner with Product, Operations, Client Services, and Engineering teams to review specifications and designs, define acceptance criteria, ensure release readiness, and troubleshoot production incidents.

● Mentor engineers, foster a collaborative culture, and provide technical guidance.

● Stay abreast of changes in audio/visual media trends and usage; evaluate and introduce tools that improve productivity, reliability, and performance; champion best practices.

● Create and maintain product documentation and developer docs.

● Clearly communicate status and open issues.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 8-12+ years of professional software development; 2+ years in a lead/technical lead role.

Languages

• Expert level proficiency in Rust and working knowledge of Python and Go.

Core Technology

• Hands-on experience developing and maintaining library/SDK-level code, signal processing pipelines, or other low-level systems software.

Performance

• Demonstrated experience profiling and optimizing systems software for throughput and latency; comfort with concurrency, memory layout, and benchmarking-driven regression testing.
• Hands-on GPU/CUDA development experience, including device detection, multi-GPU scheduling, and performance tuning, is a plus.

Databases

• Experience with MongoDB and relational databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) a plus.

Cloud

• Familiarity with AWS services (S3, Lambda, EC2, CloudWatch, etc.).

Observability

• Familiarity with observability tooling (tracing, metrics, logs) in distributed systems. OpenTelemetry experience a plus.

Containers

• Containerization with Docker and local container orchestration with Docker Compose. Experience with Nomad and Consul a plus.

Scripting

• Unix shell scripting and Python for automation, tooling, and data analysis/manipulation.

Media

• Deep understanding of audio and other media formats, codecs, and related tooling.

Additional

• C/C++ experience a plus. Familiarity with digital signal processing and/or MIR (Music Information Retrieval) a strong plus.

Soft Skills

• Excellent written and oral communication, analytical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork. Ability to influence and drive consensus within and across teams. Comfortable and productive working independently and collaboratively in a small team.

Leadership

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, conduct effective code reviews, and champion engineering best practices.

Preferred Extras

● Experience with (but not reliance on) AI-assisted development, including LLMs, IDE helpers, and other developer efficiency tools. Claude Code a plus.

● Familiarity with machine learning/neural networks.

● Working knowledge of streaming/event-driven architectures (ActiveMQ, Thrift, Protobuf).

● Familiarity with CI/CD platforms (Bamboo preferred).

● Familiarity with dependency/feature management and internal package registries or mirrors.

● Knowledge of security best practices in application development.

● Background building cross-platform tools (Unix/Linux, Mac, Windows).

● Knowledge of the music industry / music licensing.

● Musical fluency: performer, composer, tinkerer. Able to apply musical understanding to technical problem-solving.